1943 psychological profile of Hitler accessible on CU Law Library site
By Linda Myers
A rare 1943 document -- a psychological analysis of the personality of Adolph Hitler that predicted, among other things, his eventual suicide -- has just been made available to the world at large on the Cornell Law Library.
Henry Murray was a pre-World War II director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic and, during the war, served in the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS was a forerunner of the CIA and Murray was brought in by General "Wild Bill" Donovan, then the OSS director. The psychological profile of Hitler is among the papers in the Law Library's Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection.
"It's almost a unique piece," said Claire Germain, the Edward Cornell Law Librarian and professor of law at the Law School. "Posting it on the Web in pdf format makes it available to a broader audience and shows the depth and uniqueness of some of the valuable bits of history located within Cornell's walls," she said.
The document has achieved new relevance, Germain said, because of growing interest in the Holocaust, present-day war crimes trials of past dictators such as Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, and a controversial German documentary, "The Downfall," nominated for an Academy Award this year that presents Hitler as a flawed human being, rather than a demonic figure. The document may interest Holocaust and World War II scholars, military and psychology historians, students and the general public, she said.
Murray was commissioned in 1943 to help the Allied Forces understand Hitler's psychological makeup in order to predict his behavior as they pushed forward to defeat the Nazis. The document is interesting historically in that it presents a range of scenarios describing the potential effect on Hitler of Germany's defeat (Murray guessed he might kill himself in a dramatic, explosive way but also worried that he might be made into a martyr if he were killed). Included in the document are suggested strategies to convert the German people, post-war, into, in Murray's words, "a peace-loving nation," a case history of Hitler by W.H.D. Vernon, who worked under Murray's supervision, as well as copies of rarely seen photos from Hitler's life.
Murray, who gained fame when he developed an early psychology technique for analyzing personalities, wrote that Hitler had a personality type stimulated by real or imagined insult or injury, that held grudges, had a low tolerance for criticism, an excessive demand for attention and a tendency to belittle, bully or blame others and seek revenge. But his personality also manifested a persistence in the face of defeat, along with strong self-will and self-trust. However, Hitler lacked "the offsetting qualities that round out a balanced personality," wrote Murray.
"Even though psychology has moved ahead, the document still gives some insight into Hitler's personality," said Thomas Mills, a research attorney at the Law Library in charge of the Donovan collection and other rare books and special collections.
Mills says he gets frequent requests for documents in the Donovan collection, which includes much on the Nuremberg war crimes trials of Nazi leaders. Recently a lawyer defending a prisoner at Guantanamo asked if the rule imposed by the Bush administration preventing him from meeting with his client had a precedent at the Nuremberg trials. "Documents in the Donovan collection seem to indicate that at Nuremberg this was not the case," said Mills.
Murray himself was a controversial figure. Returning to Harvard after the war, he was involved in psychological experiments in 1959-62 in which a stress test similar to one the OSS used to assess recruits was administered to unwitting student volunteers, including the young Theodore Kaczynski, then a precocious student at Harvard. Kaczynski's lawyers in his trial as the Unabomber traced some of his emotional instability and fear of mind control to his role as a subject in those tests.
1943 psychological profile of Hitler accessible on CU Law Library site
By Linda Myers
A rare 1943 document -- a psychological analysis of the personality of Adolph Hitler that predicted, among other things, his eventual suicide -- has just been made available to the world at large on the Cornell Law Library.
Henry Murray was a pre-World War II director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic and, during the war, served in the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS was a forerunner of the CIA and Murray was brought in by General "Wild Bill" Donovan, then the OSS director. The psychological profile of Hitler is among the papers in the Law Library's Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection.
"It's almost a unique piece," said Claire Germain, the Edward Cornell Law Librarian and professor of law at the Law School. "Posting it on the Web in pdf format makes it available to a broader audience and shows the depth and uniqueness of some of the valuable bits of history located within Cornell's walls," she said.
The document has achieved new relevance, Germain said, because of growing interest in the Holocaust, present-day war crimes trials of past dictators such as Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, and a controversial German documentary, "The Downfall," nominated for an Academy Award this year that presents Hitler as a flawed human being, rather than a demonic figure. The document may interest Holocaust and World War II scholars, military and psychology historians, students and the general public, she said.
Murray was commissioned in 1943 to help the Allied Forces understand Hitler's psychological makeup in order to predict his behavior as they pushed forward to defeat the Nazis. The document is interesting historically in that it presents a range of scenarios describing the potential effect on Hitler of Germany's defeat (Murray guessed he might kill himself in a dramatic, explosive way but also worried that he might be made into a martyr if he were killed). Included in the document are suggested strategies to convert the German people, post-war, into, in Murray's words, "a peace-loving nation," a case history of Hitler by W.H.D. Vernon, who worked under Murray's supervision, as well as copies of rarely seen photos from Hitler's life.
Murray, who gained fame when he developed an early psychology technique for analyzing personalities, wrote that Hitler had a personality type stimulated by real or imagined insult or injury, that held grudges, had a low tolerance for criticism, an excessive demand for attention and a tendency to belittle, bully or blame others and seek revenge. But his personality also manifested a persistence in the face of defeat, along with strong self-will and self-trust. However, Hitler lacked "the offsetting qualities that round out a balanced personality," wrote Murray.
"Even though psychology has moved ahead, the document still gives some insight into Hitler's personality," said Thomas Mills, a research attorney at the Law Library in charge of the Donovan collection and other rare books and special collections.
Mills says he gets frequent requests for documents in the Donovan collection, which includes much on the Nuremberg war crimes trials of Nazi leaders. Recently a lawyer defending a prisoner at Guantanamo asked if the rule imposed by the Bush administration preventing him from meeting with his client had a precedent at the Nuremberg trials. "Documents in the Donovan collection seem to indicate that at Nuremberg this was not the case," said Mills.
Murray himself was a controversial figure. Returning to Harvard after the war, he was involved in psychological experiments in 1959-62 in which a stress test similar to one the OSS used to assess recruits was administered to unwitting student volunteers, including the young Theodore Kaczynski, then a precocious student at Harvard. Kaczynski's lawyers in his trial as the Unabomber traced some of his emotional instability and fear of mind control to his role as a subject in those tests.